At one point, she refuses to allow the doctors to perform a tracheotomy that would have ended his singing career. His wife learns that Lanegan holds the hospital record for surviving longest in this parlous state. Unable to breathe, deafened, with deep welts on his scalp and a useless leg, he is committed to hospital and put in an induced coma on kidney dialysis. No sooner had the accolades dried on that memoir than Lanegan, relocated to Ireland, land of his great-great-great-grandfather, to escape Covid, contracted Covid. They struggle to find usable veins Lanegan’s offer of his jugular is turned down by a young physician He also seemed absurdly immune to death, a characteristic that the musician refused to mine for macho points but, rather, regards as some imponderable state of undeserved grace. Lanegan emerged from that first unsparing account chastened and self-aware his gallows humour and trenchant wisdom made him a charismatic raconteur who stood outside the more conventional literature of drug glorification or rock myth-making. Prompted into existence by his friend, the late chef Anthony Bourdain – Lanegan and QOTSA’s Josh Homme did the theme tune for Bourdain’s final series, Parts Unknown – Lanegan’s first memoir detailed a life of substance misuse and the interpersonal catastrophes that flowed from them, chief, among many, the loss of Lanegan’s close pal Kurt Cobain. His celebrated 2020 memoir, Sing Backwards and Weep, is one of the bleaker tales of rock’n’roll excess ever committed to print. The author of roughly half a dozen solo albums, plus a healthy body of collaborative works that includes fronting grunge outliers Screaming Trees and time spent in Queens of the Stone Age, Lanegan is an antihero who would be the first to say he is probably undeserving of our sympathy. There is no Sticky McStickstick in Devil in a Coma, the slim but powerful volume detailing Lanegan’s own Covid ordeal, just the metaphorical two-by-four with which he beats himself. Rosen eventually swapped a wheelchair for a stick, one he wrote a children’s book about.

But cult US musician Mark Lanegan is no Michael Rosen, the beloved children’s author whose fight with Covid is justly famed as a heroic tale: the unimpeachable battling the unimaginable and emerging a trenchant critic of the government’s failures.

A t least superficially, works of medical recovery share much common ground: the bleep of life support, the arduous rebuilding of one’s new normal.

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